e Queretaro_. The first
volume, written by Fray Isidro Felis Espinosa and published in 1746, is
interesting especially on account of its reference to the fate of the
first Frenchmen brought into New Mexico, and one of whom, Juan de
Archibeque, played an important role in the first two decades of the
eighteenth century. The second volume, the author of which was Fray
Domingo de Arricivita, was published in 1792, and is the chief source
concerning the still problematical expedition to the north attributed to
two Franciscan friars in 1538. Both of these works are of relatively
minor importance, and I mention them here only for the sake of
completeness and in order to warn against attaching undue importance to
them so far as the Pueblos are concerned.

It is of course understood that I omit from the above account a number
of publications containing more or less brief and casual references to
New Mexico. Most of them are geographical, and but few allude to
historical facts. In the notes to the Documentary History proper I may
refer to some of them.

Perhaps the last book published on New Mexico in the Spanish language is
the little book of Pino, which, however, has little more than a
bibliographic value except in so far as it touches the condition of New
Mexico at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The documents in the
New Mexican and Mexican archives up to the date of the American
occupancy present features similar to those that characterize the
Spanish documents of the eighteenth century. It would be too tedious to
refer to them in detail, and I therefore dismiss them for the present
with this brief mention. If I do not mention here the literature on New
Mexico in the English language it is not due to carelessness or to
ignorance of it, but because of its much greater wealth in number and
contents, its more ready accessibility, and because in matters
respecting the history of early times the authors of these works have
all been obliged to glean their information from at least some of the
sources that I have above enumerated and discussed.

It may surprise students of New Mexican history that I have thus far
omitted the very earliest sources in print in which New Mexico is
mentioned, namely, the work of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, and
that of Gomara. The former was published in part in the first half of
the sixteenth century, the entire work appearing at Madrid not earlier
than 1850 and 1851. Its title, a